Do you fancy a really dull piece of worthless information? Yes? Well Arnold Bennett's family home, 205 Waterloo Road, Cobridge, is on the same stretch of road as the first house he occupied once he'd become famous.

Thing is the two house are separated by 120 miles.Both houses sit on what was designated the original A50 starting as a junction from the A5 in Hockliffe, Bedfordshire. This is where Trinity Hall Farm stands, the house where Arnold brought his father to die, buried in a nearby country churchyard, a long way from home.

Roads eh! You never know where they take you.

One of Stoke-on-Trent's major roads is the A500, an urban hook-up to the M6.

By the 1960s, traffic congestion throughout the city was awful caused by our rapid infatuation with the motorcar. Roads made for carts were totally unsuitable for 20th century use, and six strung out towns made conditions appallingly worse.

I remember the A50 daily bottleneck at Tunstall with turning traffic from Scotia Road into Butterfield Place and High Street where heavy transport clashed with private vehicles. It took three policemen two hours every day to clear a peak time backlog trailing beyond Burslem into the outskirts of Hanley and Porthill.Even though the M6 second phase opened in 1962, traffic problems through Stoke-on-Trent grew worse because of the unfinished connection from the city to the motorway.

The original plan for the D Road was designed to include the city. But for 10 years junction 15 at Hanford linked only the A34, and junction 16 only went as far as Etruria to join the A53. Traffic movement in Stoke-on-Trent was messy.It wasn't until 1973, that the missing link through Cliffe Vale to complete the D between 15 and 16 through the Etruria Valley was attempted.

Money, as always, was tight, due funnily enough, to worldwide-inflated oil prices. And so plans were revised to cut cost. Out went essential under and overpasses and in came our loathsome roundabouts at Basford and Porthill.Tarmac

Construction was contracted, and the completed Hanford to Talke 'D' opened as the A500 to coincide with the Queen's silver jubilee year in 1977, hence the name Queensway.

I've often heard it said, 'you can take a person from the Potteries but you can't take the Potteries from the person'. A good example is Gill Brown and her life partner Alan Bowen.You will remember Gill from her time as CEO of the local charity, Brighter Futures.A native of Essex, she came to Stoke-on-Trent in 1988, obtaining work at the then North Staffordshire Polytechnic.

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And of course after 27 years working and living in Stoke-on-Trent, Gill well and truly qualifies as a Stokie, a committed consumer of oatcakes and Titanic beer.When she received her honorary degree from Staffordshire University Gill movingly observed that, 'There are lots of challenges in Stoke-on-Trent but the place gets to you!' Well certainly the roads do!Two years ago Gill and her life partner, Stoke-on-Trent born Wrights Pie fan Alan Bowen, moved from the city and settled to semi-retirement in Launceston, Cornwall.

Unsurprisingly they are loyal members of the 'turnover' club and have a predilection for bargain hunting.When strolling down Launceston's Broad Street a couple of weeks ago, Alan and Gill entered a St Luke's Hospice charity shop and came across a small cardboard case marked 'Wedgwood' containing a six-inch fine bone china oval dish in pristine condition.

The piece bore a transfer of the D-Road emblazoned with the name 'Queensway', the logo of Tarmac Construction, the official 1977 crest for the Queen's silver jubilee, and that proud statement – Made in England.It had, no doubt, been a gift to the VIPs who attended the auspicious opening in 1977: so what's it doing on the borders of the West Country? Roads eh! You never know where they take you.